Part 10: After a bloody fight, a sense of peace

THE STORY SO FAR: Newly liberated during a forced march from the Perleberg work camp toward Luebeck, Army Pfc. Jim Creech and a Briton, Jimmy Garrigan, chased down a Nazi SS officer they had seen walking alone.

Jim had a weapon, a bayonet. Drawing on the strength he could still muster after months of brutal treatment, he plunged it into the Nazi's side again and again until the bloodied man resisted no more.

Searching the body, Jim removed a photo of the officer from a pocket. He would keep it for the rest of his life as a reminder of the revenge he had exacted.

He and Garrigan walked away and sat on a hay-baling machine. They said nothing, but relief swept over them. They knew that if they hadn't killed the officer, he would have killed them with the Luger pistol he had been trying to pull out of his holster.

Jim's desire to get even with the Nazis dissolved in a flash. He wasn't angry anymore. He felt no animosity toward the enemy. The curse of pent-up hate and resentment had lifted, and he was at peace.

He could go home now to a life away from the violence and misery that had kept him on the edge of death for so long -- to a normal life in a land of plenty where he would no longer have to be cold and hungry.

Jim Creech, age 79, is giddy with anticipation after ordering his 2,308th Brass Rail steak sandwich. The number is an estimate he made, based on how many times he's come to Allentown and "the normal consumption per number of visits" since he ate the first one in 1944, when he visited the girl he had seen in a photo.

That girl, Joyce Soprano, is his wife, and she is sitting beside him at the restaurant on Lehigh Street.

They've come to the Lehigh Valley from their home in North Carolina for a weeklong visit with relatives. With them is Joyce's sister Gloria Soprano, who still lives in south Allentown.

On every one of his visits to Allentown, Jim has gone to the restaurant -- first to the one in the 1100 block of Hamilton Street, then to the Lehigh Street location after the downtown restaurant closed in 2001.

Before he leaves, he has the employees pack up about a dozen steak sandwiches for him to take to his home 453 miles away in Knightdale, N.C., near Raleigh.

While he's in Allentown, he figures, he eats about two Brass Rail sandwiches a day. His three daughters and their four children share his enthusiasm. Anytime they travel to eastern Pennsylvania, he says, they go to The Brass Rail.

Jim stands 5 feet 6 inches. Despite his hearty appetite, the most he has weighed was 165 pounds. When he came home from the war, he weighed 110.

Joyce indulges her husband's passion for steak sandwiches and understands his appreciation for food in general. They have a large garden for growing green beans, watermelons and tomatoes. They can and freeze their vegetables.

They always have a few dozen boxes of cereal, a supply of powdered milk and cases of store-bought canned goods. They keep four freezers packed so that Jim will always know there's plenty of food within reach.

"I have to stockpile food," he says. "I have to be close to it."

That need goes back to his days as a starving prisoner and at the POW processing center in France, when the newly liberated soldier fretted that someone would take away his tray piled high with mess hall food and he promised himself he'd never go hungry again.

He would fulfill that pledge, even making food his career.

But getting on with his life would have to wait until he had completed his military service.

Coming home from the war, he brought the scars of his captivity. He'd also earned a Purple Heart and, for showing "a high order of courage, resourcefulness, stamina and skill while participating in numerous patrols, for the most part at night, under extremely hazardous and adverse conditions," a Bronze Star medal.

When Jim came to Allentown during a 30-day leave, Joyce was waiting for him. They had only met once, but she had written to him every day of his five months as a POW, though he never received her letters or anyone else's.

He and Joyce were married June 30, 1945, in Allentown after Jim asked for and received the blessing of her parents. Still in the service, he underwent rehabilitation in Miami, served at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and as a guard at a New York prison for GIs who had committed serious crimes.

Discharged in November, he went back to his hometown of Smithfield, N.C., and settled down with Joyce. He became a meat- cutter trainee at the grocery store where he worked as a teenager. He stayed in the grocery and supermarket business until retiring as an executive in the mid-1970s, then spent a few years with a meat- packing company.

Jim's Army buddy Earl Schnabel, who had introduced him to Joyce and The Brass Rail's sandwiches, returned from Europe with a Purple Heart late in 1945. He married Joyce's sister June the following Valentine's Day. They lived in Allentown and had four children.

Their marriage ended in divorce in 1971. Cancer claimed June five years later. Earl, who had remarried, died in 1989.

Like many former servicemen and women of his generation, Jim has tried to stay in contact with the people who shared his wartime experiences.

He is still friends with Heinz Stechow, the wounded German soldier he met at the German army hospital in Zweibruecken. Jim had given Heinz his address before marching to the compound for Russian POWs. Heinz, an artist, wrote to him after the war.

Jim asked whether the hospital's incinerator, into which he had dumped some ordnance the day he left in 1944, had blown up after he was marched away. Heinz didn't recall that happening.

In 1994, the two were reunited at Heinz's home in Bremen, Germany. Recently, Heinz was hospitalized for pneumonia.

Jim has never been able to locate Bill Delach, the shoemaker and his hut mate at the Perleberg prison work camp. He wants to ask Bill again where he'd hidden the silver dollar that eventually was needed to buy the silence of the German plumber who saw the carcass of the commandant's cat.

Jimmy Garrigan, the British POW who helped attack and kill the SS officer, exchanged a few letters with Jim but disappeared after deserting his wife and two children in 1953.

The Nazi flag that Jim seized while on patrol in the French village of Xanrey was presented to the Yankee Division Veterans Association in Boston after the war as the first Nazi flag the division captured. It has since vanished.

A sandwich just the same

The food arrives at Jim's Brass Rail table, but he is so caught up in telling his story that he lets his steak sandwich sit.

"Ever since I was a POW," he says, "food has been one of the mainstays in my life. It means a lot to me."

A former volunteer firefighter in Montgomery County held four fellow firefighters hostage at gunpoint in the Elkins Park section of the township Tuesday morning before being taken into custody, police said.